Modern organizations receive and store vast quantities of electronic information. Much of this information is associated in some manner with one or more people. For example, home address information may be received from a human resources system, tax-related information may be stored by an accounting system, and project-related information may be stored by a resource planning system.
Conventional systems do not provide efficient mechanisms to identify people or relations between people based on information received from different sources as described above. This deficiency is partly based on the difficulty in matching data associated with a person in one system with data associated with the same person in another system. Even if such data from disparate sources could be matched efficiently, efficient systems for storing and managing the data are lacking. Moreover, conventional techniques cannot efficiently determine, store, or manage multiple types of person-to-person relationships that may be reflected in data received from different sources.
Systems are desired for efficiently receiving and storing data representing entities and relations between the entities. Suitable systems may also store portions of the data in a source-specific manner.